A way for all of us to write back into the media and have a voice and have a critical engagement with the media. And I think that's a really good thing for society, I think we should all be media literate, readers and also writers of the media.
At some level the Television Archive Project really will allow people to not only rely on gatekeepers, people like me who are trained journalists, but to also be gatekeepers and to free themselves in terms of information.
This actually moves video from being something that's completely passive to something that people can actually engage with and share and be a part of. So it will actually make people—it will help people engage with video content in a way that they never have before and it's never been possible before with TV only news.
One context that the TV Archive could be used in an educational environment is to train students in more media literacy… showing the ways that mass media, particularly news media, maybe also commercials, portrays particular topics, and also to ask students to create those videos themselves and perhaps in the act of creating they'll be able to make choices that make them aware of the choices that the people that create the media make.
We at the Berkman Society do a lot of research into digital media and we've, because of the availability of data, have focused on the logs and other online sources of media and have gotten pretty far with that but it's pretty limiting recognizing that broadcast media is still very, very important and so we're excited to be able to get access to a fully digitized version of searchable TV clips. So it's a potential game changer for media researchers.